doesn't sound good (chip shortage to actually worsen)

[eljefino]

Yeah I've noticed a complete lack of any sort of deals on monitors, new or used.

The ones on craigslist are nearly all VGA-only.

Found my kid one with VESA that took a cheap adapter to HDMI.

 

[LDM]

It used to be that Motorola a lot of silicon to the automotive industry even to the point of them making ECMs, and GM had an in-house electronics divison(Delco Electronics). A lot of the Denso/Hitachi/Oki branded silicon in Japanese cars were actually made by NEC and Hitachi - who are now Renesas.

Yep, a lot of cars use PowerPC or SuperH architectures - a flavor of RISC. Your car isn’t too far off from a iMac/PowerMac of the 1990s-2006, Xbox 360, or a Super Nintendo/Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis/Saturn or PlayStation 1/2. ARM is now making its way into cars, Tesla is actually using AMD’s Zen 2 APUs that aren’t too far off from a Ryzen CPU with integrated graphics - VW uses Nvidia Tegra SoCs in Audis.

The small stuff - ASICs, FPGAs, and small discrete devices while essential don’t bring the fabs(notably TSMC but there’s smaller fabs as well as Samsung, NXP/Freescale and the Chinese fabs) the money. TSMC is in bed with Apple, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Samsung fabs for other companies but they also supply a lot of DRAM and NAND so they’re constrained in Korea and Austin. There’s plenty of CPUs/MCUs/SOCs but not the smaller, but equally or more important chips like drivers, regulators, transceivers, MOSFETs, and other general purpose ICs.

GM still had its own fabs for making its own chips as recent as 2012. I remember the company I worked for at the time had to me to go a site survey for networking equipment for the various GM sites over in Indiana. One of the locations I went to was the fab plant there and when I finished my survey the guy that was escorting me at the site was nice enough to show me around the fab plant. Granted it was just a quick tour since I had to go to another site for more survey stuff but I couldn't pass up taking a look at something that interesting. No idea if that plant still makes anything like that but it wouldn't surprise me if it was shut down and outsourced like most everything else has been in the last 20 years.

 

[Rmay635703]

Hyundai/Kai is reporting they will be up to 100% production by end of year.

This is after they decided to produce their own chips in early 2021.

Considering auto makers chips are on par with state of the art 20-40 years ago they could easily buy an old fab for pennies and be set for life.

Some of the ecm crap is on par with a featured out virtualized 6502

 

[nthach]

GM still had its own fabs for making its own chips as recent as 2012. I remember the company I worked for at the time had to me to go a site survey for networking equipment for the various GM sites over in Indiana. One of the locations I went to was the fab plant there and when I finished my survey the guy that was escorting me at the site was nice enough to show me around the fab plant. Granted it was just a quick tour since I had to go to another site for more survey stuff but I couldn't pass up taking a look at something that interesting. No idea if that plant still makes anything like that but it wouldn't surprise me if it was shut down and outsourced like most everything else has been in the last 20 years.

Delco Electronics became Delphi, which was split into Delphi Automotive(Borg-Warner) and Aptiv. AFAIK, Aptiv carries on the legacy of Delco Electronics/Packard Wire.

 

[PandaBear]

Considering auto makers chips are on par with state of the art 20-40 years ago they could easily buy an old fab for pennies and be set for life.

Some of the ecm crap is on par with a featured out virtualized 6502

Most of the newer stuff are 14nm, but older stuff likely are way older like 130nm or something like that. Wouldn't be 20-40 years state of the art but at least 10 for sure. Military may have special stuff that use older tech and their own fab to certify / are classified / must be kept alive for security reason, but automotive is likely going to be 28nm or so by now, so probably 10 year or so behind.

Some stuff actually requires speed, a lot of those safety feature, air bag deployment, etc. Then the infotainment is pretty much just a glorified cell phone so those need to be fast too, despite automotive grade.

 

[PandaBear]

Yeah I've noticed a complete lack of any sort of deals on monitors, new or used.

The ones on craigslist are nearly all VGA-only.

Found my kid one with VESA that took a cheap adapter to HDMI.

I just sold some DDR3 ram yesterday. I sold it for the same price I paid for it new 10 years ago.
I sold a motherboard + CPU that's DDR3 last year and I made money, about 20% more than I paid for it 12 years ago.

At work we are each using 2 monitors at work and 2 at home, kid is now using 1 ext monitor on the chrome book they broke instead of fixing it (parts cost went way too high on ebay to be worth fixing, used monitor from 12 years ago is cheaper).

Crazy world.

 

[Rmay635703]

2 of my work screens are 4:3 engineering screens from about 17 years ago.

Engineering laptop is relatively recent

Chip Shortage in Automotive: Why Capacities for Chips Will Not Return

Today, billions of products from washing machines to smartphones and cars rely on semiconductors. Electronic devices, however, feature different types of chips.

www.linkedin.com

While a very small number of automotive components are 14nm or less the vast majority are 40-60nm or larger

Automotive Power components and analog components are still commonly 0.25um depending on the output and Voltage requirements

The automotive chip shortage won’t be solved because nobody installs legacy fabs and cutting edge is unlikely to ever end up in automotive.

Best case would be If decommissioned fabs could be resourced and brought back online.

 

[nthach]

Considering auto makers chips are on par with state of the art 20-40 years ago they could easily buy an old fab for pennies and be set for life.

Some of the ecm crap is on par with a featured out virtualized 6502

The 68K architecture from Motorola(which became Freescale Semiconductor after the first Motorola breakup and now part of NXP, ST also uses 68K), a flavor of RISC that Apple used in the Mac from the 1980s well into the 1990s before PowerPC is still used widespread in automotive and industrial/medical/HVAC/appliance controls. PowerPC, also a Motorola project is also very common in cars. ARM is making it way into cars but not for powertrain IIRC.

 

[PandaBear]

The 68K architecture from Motorola(which became Freescale Semiconductor after the first Motorola breakup and now part of NXP, ST also uses 68K), a flavor of RISC that Apple used in the Mac from the 1980s well into the 1990s before PowerPC is still used widespread in automotive and industrial/medical/HVAC/appliance controls. PowerPC, also a Motorola project is also very common in cars. ARM is making it way into cars but not for powertrain IIRC.

Last time I heard ARM still charge a per core license, so that's a pretty big expense when alternative like 68K / MIPS / ARC / SH are available and already proven to work.

 

[nthach]

Last time I heard ARM still charge a per core license, so that's a pretty big expense when alternative like 68K / MIPS / ARC / SH are available and already proven to work.

Rumor was that Nvidia wanted to buy ARM. The DOJ put the brakes on that deal.

 

[nthach]

Some stuff actually requires speed, a lot of those safety feature, air bag deployment, etc. Then the infotainment is pretty much just a glorified cell phone so those need to be fast too, despite automotive grade.

Funny, an aftermarket Pioneer/Sony/Kenwood deck with CarPlay/Android Auto seems quicker than some of the OEM stuff(mostly Toyota and the old MyFord Touch). The SoC Pioneer or Kenwood’s using has the same compute power as an iPhone 3GS or Fire TV, a single-core ARM CPU.

Only Audi and Tesla are using PC/gaming-class CPUs/APUs.

 

[dlundblad]

A bit off topic, but dad just picked up a 2022 Expedition Timberline. Due to the chip shortage, it doesn’t have the start stop engine feature. I thought that was pretty awesome. Never cared for that feature anyway.